Notes From New Vegas 31
Jan. 19th, 2012 03:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
camwynNotes From New Vegas 31: Eeeeeeew
When last we saw our heroine, Janice had just performed a major feat of psychology and persuaded Dog and God to integrate both personalities into a single individual and not blow her up. Also she had killed some Ghost People because they got through the door somehow and were being their usual charming stab-everybody-to-death selves. So the next thing to do, once she jammed some chips into the Madre vending machine on the balcony overlooking the lobby, was patch herself up a bit and go look for Dean. Dean’s collar signal was coming from, surprise surprise, the Tampico Theater, which was pretty much up one set of stairs and a quick left turn from the main lobby. Naturally, Janice headed there next. And naturally, Father Jerkface shot his mouth off- “if that ghoul’s still alive, correct that- or break him.”
Sorry, Lije, not gonna happen. You forgot to say ‘would you kindly’.
*ahem* What I mean is, Janice rolled her eyes and stonked past the security terminal and past the pair of embracing skeletons and over to the OH GREAT COLLAR’S BEEPING locked door and went at it with a bobby pin and a screwdriver because she was starting to get really, really tired of arguing with computers. The beep inducer was on the other side- one of about six or seven strategically placed malfunctioning speakers, all of which were glowing with the Ha Ha You Live In A World Where God Is Arbitrary And Cruel red light of not-being-able-to-be-blown-up. Fortunately this was the theater main floor and there was a safe zone in the middle of the seating area, right in front of center stage. The place actually looked pretty nice if you ignored the bone piles in some of the chairs (I refuse to believe that if a person died in one place, their bones would remain connected and articulated two hundred years later, but skeletons are nonetheless a single in-game object each). The safe spot happened to be just in front of a music stand with actual sheet music on it, and also a key that someone had stuck into the music, and oh, hey, hi, Dean, good to see you again.
Yeah, Dean had been somewhere backstage and popped his head out from a stagehand’s door when he heard Janice messing around. Turned out he’d woken up in the Tampico the same way Janice had awakened in the lobby and walked up to a microphone on the stage, only to suddenly be greeted by a barrage of security holograms in full-on rage mode. He bolted, because really, what else are you supposed to do, and now was pretty much pinned down in a very small portion of the backstage area because there were speakers all over the place and holograms out front and he really didn’t want to die.
Janice, in all honesty, could not blame him. However, Dean was kind of blithering, which is never attractive behavior in anyone even if they do have a nose and all their skin. She had to talk him down a bit- “wait, when you say to bolt to the left and get up there to join you, do you mean my left or your left”, “is there a central speaker control console I should know about,” etc. Once Dean stopped wigging out the XP for passing Speech and Science and Intelligence challenges started rolling in, and he told her where several speakers were, and where to find the key in his room that would unlock Vera Keyes’ old dressing room with the master control codes to the sound system in it, and no he wasn’t going to tell her why he had a key to Vera’s room, she was a big girl, she could figure it out. Anyway, he thanked her and wished her luck and retreated, at which point she didn’t wait for the holos to reappear. She just bolted.
Now, as far as I can tell, there were several possible ways to survive the backstage run. With enough skill, you could disable the hologram emitters and then just scoot past the speakers. Or with a couple hits of Turbo you could run fast enough to grab the key from Dean’s room and then bolt for Vera’s room. Or you could be Janice and engage in some Bang Therapy, which is to say just shoot the crap out of all the speakers and radios you come across except the one in Dean’s room, since he asked nicely if you would mind just turning it off instead. Janice kind of liked Bang Therapy. What she really liked was that Father Jerkface didn’t bother her the whole time. Really, that was practically bliss by this point. She managed to switch off all the speakers and grab the appropriate sound recordings and keys, and then outran a couple of security holograms to make it up to the control booth that would let her flip the ‘hey, the show’s started’ switch and deactivate the holos.
‘Course, that’s about when Jerkface started bugging her to kill Dean again. I’m pretty sure she tried to bash her Pip-Boy to death on a wall at that point since it was the only way he could talk to her, but the damn thing was indestructible.
She headed around backstage now that the risk of horrible splodey death was gone and found Dean, who thanked her profusely, and then offered to fill her in on a way to make Father Jerkface pay. (As he put it, “I know why I’m here. The old guy, and you. And since you’re wearing a collar and he’s not, I trust you a little bit more than him.”) Father Jerkface wanted the Madre, he said, and he wanted what was in the Casino’s vault most of all. Unfortunately there was the little part where, way back in the olden days, Fred Sinclair had built the Madre largely as an attempt to impress Vera Keyes- who had been Dean’s partner in crime, more or less. Dean had wrapped her around his finger and introduced her to Sinclair, and figured he could pull her strings once Sinclair was besotted. He really didn’t like the way Sinclair apparently thought he was above it all, how Sinclair thought everything was shining and wonderful, how Sinclair was high and mighty, etc. etc….your basic spoiled child/Objectivist antagonist whine, really. About stuff that’d happened two hundred years ago, at this point, which was what Janice pointed out. As far as she knew, unless there was a ghoul around here she hadn’t seen, Sinclair and Vera were both dead.
Well, yes, yes they were, but at that point Dean confessed to two things. One, the lock that controlled access to the Madre’s vaults was voice controlled, keyed to, hah, Vera Keyes’ voice. And two, it was kind of him that put Christine in that autodoc, basically so that he could set it up to restructure her throat with Vera Keyes’ voice. If she lived and it worked, great, and if not, now that they were ripping security to shreds he could probably dig up enough sound clips from somewhere to piece Vera’s voice together.
Man, that would’ve been creepytastic even coming from somebody with skin.
Anyway, Dean then thanked Janice for having gotten the two of them this far alive, and wished her luck with the rest of the caper, but said he was going to stay out of the way for a while. Janice didn’t really mind, because he’d just fessed up to carrying a grudge against a dead man for two hundred years and mutilating an unsuspecting woman in order to carry that grudge out. He was no longer the kind of person she would feel comfortable in the same elevator with, so to speak. Nevertheless, she figured that it was too late now for killing him to do Christine or anyone else any good, even if Father Jerkface had been telling the truth about the collars, and so instead of murdering him in cold blood she bid him a polite farewell and headed back to the lobby for another round of Shut Up Father Jerkface, I Hope The Ghost People Get You.
(At this point I should mention that many, many other people do not get this ending with Dean and are forced into a situation where either he kills them or they have to kill him. Apparently, if you make any Barter skill checks with him, he takes it as you being just like Sinclair and getting the better of him or something like that, and gets all stroppy at the end. I never knew this until I mentioned my game to a friend. Also, if you check certain terminals and pick the lock on the safe in Dean’s room, you can find out he was blackmailing the living daylights out of Vera Keyes way back when- among other things, with her Med-X addiction. Charming man, really.)
From the lobby the next step was to find Christine, and I would go into more detail here, but Christine was up in the Executive Suites and I hate them. So much. With a Vault 34-like kind of hatred. I hate trying to navigate in them. I hate trying to remember whether I’ve been to a certain area in them. I hate trying to follow my Pip-Boy map in them. I hate the sudden random laser hologram death women in them. I hate the room where SOMETHING is setting off my collar beep but I can’t FIND the damn thing to defuse or destroy it before the beep gets to ‘five seconds to Jackson Pollock’ status. I hate the pockets of Cloud drifting through bashed-in walls. I hate pretty much everything ABOUT the damned Suites except for the eventual conversation you have with Christine when you finally find her, because they more or less exemplify everything wrong with this add-on: the pointless mazes, the arbitrary deathiness you can’t do anything about, the grimness without levity or irony. Honestly, if it weren’t for the fact that they were the only thing between me and the Sierra Madre vault- and the end of the expansion- I probably would’ve given up at this point long ago. By the time Janice finally found where Christine had been stashed away, she mostly wanted to find the Madre’s vault so she could destroy everything in it and then nobody could have the stupid thing.
Look, there’s no real food anywhere in the Madre except for some rather unnervingly labeled “pre-War steaks” in the freezers of the restaurant kitchen. The only things keeping Janice alive at that point were Twinkies, ancient mac and cheese, and frothing, furious hatred. Mostly the hatred. Blowing up the Madre vault would serve Elijah right, regardless of whatever she might’ve promised Dean.
I’ll go into the conversation with Christine later. Right now, I’m going to Starbucks.
When last we saw our heroine, Janice had just performed a major feat of psychology and persuaded Dog and God to integrate both personalities into a single individual and not blow her up. Also she had killed some Ghost People because they got through the door somehow and were being their usual charming stab-everybody-to-death selves. So the next thing to do, once she jammed some chips into the Madre vending machine on the balcony overlooking the lobby, was patch herself up a bit and go look for Dean. Dean’s collar signal was coming from, surprise surprise, the Tampico Theater, which was pretty much up one set of stairs and a quick left turn from the main lobby. Naturally, Janice headed there next. And naturally, Father Jerkface shot his mouth off- “if that ghoul’s still alive, correct that- or break him.”
Sorry, Lije, not gonna happen. You forgot to say ‘would you kindly’.
*ahem* What I mean is, Janice rolled her eyes and stonked past the security terminal and past the pair of embracing skeletons and over to the OH GREAT COLLAR’S BEEPING locked door and went at it with a bobby pin and a screwdriver because she was starting to get really, really tired of arguing with computers. The beep inducer was on the other side- one of about six or seven strategically placed malfunctioning speakers, all of which were glowing with the Ha Ha You Live In A World Where God Is Arbitrary And Cruel red light of not-being-able-to-be-blown-up. Fortunately this was the theater main floor and there was a safe zone in the middle of the seating area, right in front of center stage. The place actually looked pretty nice if you ignored the bone piles in some of the chairs (I refuse to believe that if a person died in one place, their bones would remain connected and articulated two hundred years later, but skeletons are nonetheless a single in-game object each). The safe spot happened to be just in front of a music stand with actual sheet music on it, and also a key that someone had stuck into the music, and oh, hey, hi, Dean, good to see you again.
Yeah, Dean had been somewhere backstage and popped his head out from a stagehand’s door when he heard Janice messing around. Turned out he’d woken up in the Tampico the same way Janice had awakened in the lobby and walked up to a microphone on the stage, only to suddenly be greeted by a barrage of security holograms in full-on rage mode. He bolted, because really, what else are you supposed to do, and now was pretty much pinned down in a very small portion of the backstage area because there were speakers all over the place and holograms out front and he really didn’t want to die.
Janice, in all honesty, could not blame him. However, Dean was kind of blithering, which is never attractive behavior in anyone even if they do have a nose and all their skin. She had to talk him down a bit- “wait, when you say to bolt to the left and get up there to join you, do you mean my left or your left”, “is there a central speaker control console I should know about,” etc. Once Dean stopped wigging out the XP for passing Speech and Science and Intelligence challenges started rolling in, and he told her where several speakers were, and where to find the key in his room that would unlock Vera Keyes’ old dressing room with the master control codes to the sound system in it, and no he wasn’t going to tell her why he had a key to Vera’s room, she was a big girl, she could figure it out. Anyway, he thanked her and wished her luck and retreated, at which point she didn’t wait for the holos to reappear. She just bolted.
Now, as far as I can tell, there were several possible ways to survive the backstage run. With enough skill, you could disable the hologram emitters and then just scoot past the speakers. Or with a couple hits of Turbo you could run fast enough to grab the key from Dean’s room and then bolt for Vera’s room. Or you could be Janice and engage in some Bang Therapy, which is to say just shoot the crap out of all the speakers and radios you come across except the one in Dean’s room, since he asked nicely if you would mind just turning it off instead. Janice kind of liked Bang Therapy. What she really liked was that Father Jerkface didn’t bother her the whole time. Really, that was practically bliss by this point. She managed to switch off all the speakers and grab the appropriate sound recordings and keys, and then outran a couple of security holograms to make it up to the control booth that would let her flip the ‘hey, the show’s started’ switch and deactivate the holos.
‘Course, that’s about when Jerkface started bugging her to kill Dean again. I’m pretty sure she tried to bash her Pip-Boy to death on a wall at that point since it was the only way he could talk to her, but the damn thing was indestructible.
She headed around backstage now that the risk of horrible splodey death was gone and found Dean, who thanked her profusely, and then offered to fill her in on a way to make Father Jerkface pay. (As he put it, “I know why I’m here. The old guy, and you. And since you’re wearing a collar and he’s not, I trust you a little bit more than him.”) Father Jerkface wanted the Madre, he said, and he wanted what was in the Casino’s vault most of all. Unfortunately there was the little part where, way back in the olden days, Fred Sinclair had built the Madre largely as an attempt to impress Vera Keyes- who had been Dean’s partner in crime, more or less. Dean had wrapped her around his finger and introduced her to Sinclair, and figured he could pull her strings once Sinclair was besotted. He really didn’t like the way Sinclair apparently thought he was above it all, how Sinclair thought everything was shining and wonderful, how Sinclair was high and mighty, etc. etc….your basic spoiled child/Objectivist antagonist whine, really. About stuff that’d happened two hundred years ago, at this point, which was what Janice pointed out. As far as she knew, unless there was a ghoul around here she hadn’t seen, Sinclair and Vera were both dead.
Well, yes, yes they were, but at that point Dean confessed to two things. One, the lock that controlled access to the Madre’s vaults was voice controlled, keyed to, hah, Vera Keyes’ voice. And two, it was kind of him that put Christine in that autodoc, basically so that he could set it up to restructure her throat with Vera Keyes’ voice. If she lived and it worked, great, and if not, now that they were ripping security to shreds he could probably dig up enough sound clips from somewhere to piece Vera’s voice together.
Man, that would’ve been creepytastic even coming from somebody with skin.
Anyway, Dean then thanked Janice for having gotten the two of them this far alive, and wished her luck with the rest of the caper, but said he was going to stay out of the way for a while. Janice didn’t really mind, because he’d just fessed up to carrying a grudge against a dead man for two hundred years and mutilating an unsuspecting woman in order to carry that grudge out. He was no longer the kind of person she would feel comfortable in the same elevator with, so to speak. Nevertheless, she figured that it was too late now for killing him to do Christine or anyone else any good, even if Father Jerkface had been telling the truth about the collars, and so instead of murdering him in cold blood she bid him a polite farewell and headed back to the lobby for another round of Shut Up Father Jerkface, I Hope The Ghost People Get You.
(At this point I should mention that many, many other people do not get this ending with Dean and are forced into a situation where either he kills them or they have to kill him. Apparently, if you make any Barter skill checks with him, he takes it as you being just like Sinclair and getting the better of him or something like that, and gets all stroppy at the end. I never knew this until I mentioned my game to a friend. Also, if you check certain terminals and pick the lock on the safe in Dean’s room, you can find out he was blackmailing the living daylights out of Vera Keyes way back when- among other things, with her Med-X addiction. Charming man, really.)
From the lobby the next step was to find Christine, and I would go into more detail here, but Christine was up in the Executive Suites and I hate them. So much. With a Vault 34-like kind of hatred. I hate trying to navigate in them. I hate trying to remember whether I’ve been to a certain area in them. I hate trying to follow my Pip-Boy map in them. I hate the sudden random laser hologram death women in them. I hate the room where SOMETHING is setting off my collar beep but I can’t FIND the damn thing to defuse or destroy it before the beep gets to ‘five seconds to Jackson Pollock’ status. I hate the pockets of Cloud drifting through bashed-in walls. I hate pretty much everything ABOUT the damned Suites except for the eventual conversation you have with Christine when you finally find her, because they more or less exemplify everything wrong with this add-on: the pointless mazes, the arbitrary deathiness you can’t do anything about, the grimness without levity or irony. Honestly, if it weren’t for the fact that they were the only thing between me and the Sierra Madre vault- and the end of the expansion- I probably would’ve given up at this point long ago. By the time Janice finally found where Christine had been stashed away, she mostly wanted to find the Madre’s vault so she could destroy everything in it and then nobody could have the stupid thing.
Look, there’s no real food anywhere in the Madre except for some rather unnervingly labeled “pre-War steaks” in the freezers of the restaurant kitchen. The only things keeping Janice alive at that point were Twinkies, ancient mac and cheese, and frothing, furious hatred. Mostly the hatred. Blowing up the Madre vault would serve Elijah right, regardless of whatever she might’ve promised Dean.
I’ll go into the conversation with Christine later. Right now, I’m going to Starbucks.
no subject
Date: 2012-01-19 10:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-01-19 11:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-01-20 02:32 pm (UTC)*falls over laughing* Have another internets for your collection, please.
The only things keeping Janice alive at that point were
Twinkies[Fancy Lads], ancient mac and cheese, and frothing, furious hatred.Fixed that for you?
no subject
Date: 2012-01-20 02:36 pm (UTC)